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Psychosmurf comments on How I Lost 100 Pounds Using TDT - Less Wrong
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Just what kind of a calorie deficit were you running when you experienced this?
I think she was probably on 1200cal/day or something like that? Maybe less? Naturally, eating more hadn't produced weight loss, so she went lower, which naturally also failed to produce weight loss.
Now, you say "she", and that's important. For women, their weight fluctuates a lot more throughout the day simply due to water intake and excretion. I think it's possible that she was losing weight in the form of body fat but it failed to show up on her scale. What is recommended is that one measures their weight as a weighted moving average. There's an app on the hacker's diet site that does just that.
1200 cal/day sounds extremely low unless this person is very small. However, that doesn't really tell me anything unless you can also give me her height and weight at the time. The calorie deficit is what's important. Also, was she exercising on top of this 1200 calorie diet?
There are a lot of people who assert that they cannot lose weight on 1200 calories per day. Normally such people assert that it is their metabolism.
When such people are metabolically tested, it is invariably discovered that their metabolisms are perfectly normal and they eat far more calories than they realize.
Of course the claim being made by Eliezer's friend is a bit different. It's that if she has enough of a calorie deficit to lose weight, her fat cells will not give up enough energy to make up the deficit. So that she will feel terrible but not lose any weight. While I concede that there may be people out there like that, it's a pretty extraordinary claim for any individual to make. For one thing, even if your fat storage system is working perfectly normally, it will be uncomfortable to run a caloric deficit especially in the early days of a diet as your body adjusts. Such discomfort is widely reported among all dieter, successful or not. So how can the person possibly know that she isn't experiencing the normal discomfort experienced by all dieters? I would want a medical diagnosis before concluding that something was so seriously wrong with a person's fat storage system.
Here's a question: Did the individual successfully lose weight in the past (even if they later regained)? If so, that's a good indication that their fat storage system is working properly.
My suspicion is that she neither experienced ordinary discomfort nor does she have a faulty metabolism. Rather, it's possible that her weight loss strategy was far too extreme. A caloric deficit of more than 25% is considered very dangerous. If she did cut her calories that far, then it's little wonder why she went through hell. Add that to the random variation in her weight caused by water and then it's obvious why she'd given up on trying to lose weight.
Is the caloric deficit inherently dangerous or is it that people usually cut the wrong things from their diet? Do you think there are significant dangers to an otherwise healthy person who gets all the micronutrients they need during the deficit and does it only for a month or two?
Yes, an extreme caloric deficit would be dangerous to anybody. If the body can't make up the difference between the energy expended and energy eaten by burning fat, it will go into starvation mode, slow down, start eating muscle mass and eventually the internal organs.
I'm not sure I understand why the body would eat internal organs on a two month diet when there's plenty of fat and muscle to burn, or why losing some muscle mass would be dangerous.
The heart is made of muscle tissue, and the digestive system is lined with it.
Yeah, smooth muscle and heart muscle, different kinds of tissues from skeletal muscle. I doubt the body has trouble differentiating them.
Yes now that I think about it that's the most likely explanation. I've been informally researching diet and weight loss for nearly two years now. One thing I've informally observed is that self-deception is a big problem in dieting. Thus when failed dieters report on their failure, they have a tendency to underestimate their caloric intake; they also have a tendency to assert that there is something wrong with their metabolism.